Illustration Design

Chris Pinstripe is an Automotive Artist living and working in Huntington Beach California, Chris’s full-time job is to be an artist. Every day he goes to his own studio and sketches, paints, works on digital illustrations.

Very talented he is driven by his strong passion.

Here you can find more info about his beautiful works click: Pinstripe Works

To know how to draw reflections on your car sketches & illustrations is very important. Many of you use markers and colored pencils to apply those black shapes on side windows and windshields, however many of you make several mistakes which are really visible. The secret is to understand how a reflection behaves on a surface.

Start always from Basic Shapes and study how objects placed around, those basic shapes, reflect into each one of them, there you will have the first answer about how a reflection will display itself on a given surface.

My latest eBook REFLECTIONS tries to help with simple explanations and tutorials thanks also to Hakan Saracoglu’s car sketches donated to make this ebook a better one.

( Hakan Design Director at Chery Motors and ex student of mine at Art Center Europe back in 1992.)

Alain Derosier is a French young designer working in China. Today looking at his blog I found this nice Photoshop tutorial that I am happy to publish here to show it to you.

As you can see Alan starts from a free-hand simple sketch that already has the right proportions, perspective, line quality and composition on the page. The wheels are very well done following the perspective.

What really is strong in this illustration is the control of its Focal Point (front wheel/hood/ground) with the light effect which is driving our attention to it first before admiring the rest of the illustration. Reading from left to right.

The balance between the light and shadow is perfect and the color treatment, too.

Many of you are asking me how to use markers on a simple line work sketch to start quickly understand your car sketch shapes and volumes. I have decided to make this simple 2 pages tutorial, with written indications, to make clear few key points to start correctly and they are:

1 Side V. Perspective – you wheels are circles or 90° ellipses with minor axes to Infinite

2 Do not forget to sketch your Center Line for good balance in perspective

6 Check on the upper left corner the Composition page sketch to follow

Use Black marker for Vertical Background & Car Shadow on the grand, however you will also use Black for your windshield and side glass reflections.

With a Light #1 Cold Gray Marker start your reflections area, later use a #2 Cold Gray Marker and later a #3 Cold Gray Marker. With those three markers you will create a blending degraded from darker Gray to lighter Gray. The top of your car and all surfaces facing the sky they will be ultra light because of sun light.

That is it! Check my drawing with markers and try to do the same as much as you can.

Sketching Car Interiors is not an easy thing to do, compared to exterior sketching interiors are more complicated. The relationship between empty and full spaces is completely different, for beginners I suggest the “BOX” method.

You sketch a box in the right proportions and later start sketching the interior of that box so it will be easier to manage all interior elements to draw (dash board, consoles, door panels at so on…).